Raising children involves a whole lot of simple constraints that you gradually relax.
“Don’t touch the knife” becomes “You can use _this_ knife, if an adult is watching,” which becomes “You can use these knives but you have to be careful, tell me what that means” and then “you have free run of the knife drawer, the bandages are over there.” But there’s careful supervision at each step and you want to see that they’re ready before moving up. I haven’t seen any evidence of that at all in LLM training—it seems to be more akin to handing each toddler every book ever written about knives and a blade and waiting to see what happens.
“Don’t touch the knife” becomes “You can use _this_ knife, if an adult is watching,” which becomes “You can use these knives but you have to be careful, tell me what that means” and then “you have free run of the knife drawer, the bandages are over there.” But there’s careful supervision at each step and you want to see that they’re ready before moving up. I haven’t seen any evidence of that at all in LLM training—it seems to be more akin to handing each toddler every book ever written about knives and a blade and waiting to see what happens.